


The Nights Snapped Out of Sight

by Ariasune



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh!
Genre: Author's Note about Serious and Current Issues in Society, Gen, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Isolation, Mental Institutions, Neglect, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Non-Consensual Electroconvulsive Therapy, Restraints, Semi-Isolation, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-10
Updated: 2014-07-10
Packaged: 2018-02-08 06:38:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1930458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ariasune/pseuds/Ariasune
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Akhet!verse, title comes from The Hanging Man by Sylvia Plath:</p><p>Under the assumption that Bakura was a symptom of mental illness, Ryou does the practical thing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Nights Snapped Out of Sight

**Author's Note:**

> To clarify, in Akhet various memories have been sealed, including many of the details on what Yami Bakura was. However reality is unchanged, and Ryou has come to the logical conclusion that Bakura was a result of psychosis.

There was a shrieking in his stomach, and it clambered up through his body like a thing alive- laid flat against his back, and slipped into his spine- pulled at his bones and clamped into his nerves- bit and worried at him- his stomach rolled with each hushed screech-

But all this shrieking was muted, hushed away, kept out of reach: he groaned, pressing his face into the sheet stretched out beneath him. Wriggled his fingers, and they gave an unenthusiastic twitch. Worried at his restraints, “Facedown again,” His voice bubbled, frothing in his throat, “It’s gotta kill some people.”

He didn’t want to die, so he turned his head to the left – away from the door – and felt the sheet stinging against his cheek.

Gaps peppered into his memory, lazy and languid, and there beneath his skin was the slightest burn of an electric shock. The vague, disinterested reminder he did not consent.

He sighed, sliding unevenly into the rich darkness that would pass for sleep.

* * *

Ryou had been admitted voluntarily, clicking his tongue over the average stay of four hundred days, “Well,” He commented, smiling nervously, “I hope I’m not going to be here that long.”

Twenty-two days later, he had leaned heavily against the same counter, pale and fragile. His weight dipped on his toes, then to his heels, as he looked across his release forms expressionlessly. He braced a hand on the desk, cutting off his light sway with a grimace. The frown was pale, sliding off his features.

“Here,” A slim, manicured finger tapped a box and Ryou hovered his pen over it.

His hair was shoved into an untidy ponytail that was losing strands for every second. Ryou clawed at the fraying hairs, fidgeting with his pen, “I sign here- and-?”

“Initials here,” Ryou scribbled at the small box, “And sign here,” Another frantic scribble, “Congratulations on your recovery.”

“Uhuh,” Ryou muttered, rolling the pen across the counter, and pulling at the sleeves of his jumper, “Thanks, I guess.”

* * *

This was meant to help, Ryou reminded himself in the neck-deep fog of sedation. He batted at the hands anyway, “I didn’t-“ He argued. He hadn’t done anything wrong, he didn’t think so anyway. There hadn’t been too much room, so he’d acquired a roommate. A crying, restrained, frightened roommate. He’d just asked for help.

The world was veering milkily around him, and he wasn’t sure where his hands began or if his wrists were cut off numbly; couldn’t feel.

“Didn’t?” Ryou had yelled, voice high in concern when his roommate had begun to howl like a speared animal. Harsh and pained, desperate, words a jumble of pleas. Ryou had begged for someone to help.

Now he couldn’t feel his own body, whatever was left of him had retracted to a dull semi-circlet about his throat. Panic jerked through him at the drain of control.

“Not again,” He whined, tongue a foreign shape in his mouth, loose and hapless, “Please not again,” He sounded like an animal, leg caught in a steel-jawed trap, fading from bloodloss.

This was meant to help; he had come here to make sure he was tested, then medicated, and whatever it was inside him that hurt people, would be torn out.

* * *

He half-expects the Other One to appear at his shoulder, run a ghoulish hand down his shoulder like a rake of claws. Bakura, Bakura, ghost in the skin, doesn’t appear, and Ryou’s brain flicks off, reformats into gibberish and he convulses hard.

* * *

His memory of the last few years is haphazard at best, but the edges are smoothed over. These new gaps are gaping wounds, spilling stickily into his mind. He remembers washing his clothes out with cold water, Bakura’s voice rolling around his skull like marbles in the brain.

Clicking and clacking with laughter, Ryou gulps.

His hands are cold, soaked to the wrist in freezing water. His shirt is probably ruined. His fingers feel brittle with how cool they are-

Ryou comes to, gasping and pulling at his wrists. He’s facedown across the bed, and incredulously, he pulls again. It bites, “Bakura?” He asks aloud. Radio silence on all crazy signals.

“What did-?” This isn’t new, waking up with his body humming from something he can’t remember. What’s new is the unsettling silence. What’s new is- “I didn’t agree to-” His brain tickers, reels dry.

They induced a seizure, and he can barely remember it. Ryou groans, deep, guttural, and drops his face back into the sheets. He feels cut open all over again, but he’s still sure he would never submit to this. He’s even more sure that if Bakura is still around, he wouldn’t stand for it either.

The remaining explanation turns his stomach.

* * *

He thinks someone might be touching him, and some part of his mind – sharp, fresh-faced and experienced – lashes out hard to hit the Ghost. There is no contact, and there is no Bakura scratching at him like a cat sharpening its claws. There is somebody real wringing his skin with an almost professional curiousity.

“Who?” He sounds slurred, words mugged by some sedative. He licks his dry lips, and the restraints pull at his wrists, “Who’s…?”

The professional curiousity turns vicious with a cuffing of Ryou’s already stinging head. Pull at his hair. Fingernails scraping the inside of Ryou’s mouth. Tongue at his neck like sandpaper.

 _Oh_ , he realizes with a cold thunk of dread, and stops squirming.

* * *

It’s been eight days, probably, and Ryou is curled into a ball, rubbing his wrists quietly. Nobody comes in to see him that day, and left to his own thoughts, he comes to the realization that they are his own. Bakura is not there, and even if he was, Ryou is now in the business of faking an abrupt improvement.

When a nurse comes in, Ryou stays pliant, smiles as they prepare to induce a seizure. There is something horrible swirling in his gut, a sense of violation and fear for his already thin memories. But he stays docile – he’s very practiced at that one – and when his vision cuts out like his nervous system has been severed, he hopes he doesn’t make a fuss.

It’s been seven days, he’s told when he comes round. He knows he’s been subject to emergency electroshock therapy, and the muscle relaxant is coiled thickly in his body, but he keeps asking why everything stings. Why his muscles ache. Why his skull seems to only be half-there.

They put him under, shoving him face-first in a haze of medication and he wakes up pulling at his wrists in confusion.

* * *

He staggers through the next week like a drunkard, haplessly lumbering through hot-flashes of memories. His throat hurts badly, and he asks for a drink, and he doesn’t remember getting it, and his throat still burns.

He tries to stay polite, tries to smile, but he wakes up dizzy, body open. Days blurring together in a scalding mess of headaches and throbbing muscles.

Could’t help but plead when he pisses himself, restrained at three-points to the bed. He just couldn’t help pleading for, if not help, at least attention. His roommate yowls, and one night, he calls them Bakura and joins in.

* * *

It is his thirteenth day when Ryou unwinds from his ball, eyes brightening, “I’ve got it!” He crawls out of bed, testing his wrists out the way he always does, “Dad’s… dad’s phone,” He pounds at the door, sobbing a steady stream of digits out.

“Call my dad please call him!” Ryou hammers his hands against the door, “Please?” It’s a bad idea, and when it opens he takes five paces back, sits down on the bed, hands raised over his head.

“I just want to call my dad,” He whimpers. His submissive pose doesn’t really change what happens next, but two days – one humiliating, unrelated, probing assault that makes him shake – later they let him call his father. He’d forgotten his father was in America this business quarter.

He screams at that one: genuinely, blood-curdling, tears rolling down his face.

* * *

The next day doesn’t exist.

Sure it happens, Ryou might admit, but it doesn’t exist. It slides past in a waxy slip of hopelessness and a glossy uncertainty that shines when he tilts the thought just right.

He doesn’t know what to do, and so does nothing, and there is a relief that comes from that.

Ryou simply curls limp on the bed, and lets the day slip inside him.

He thinks about it, reacting that is. About eating when his stomach snarls at him softly, or getting up to pee when there is a solid, tangible ache in his pelvis, or drinking when his throat turns dry and cracks in the heat of his body.

But what if it’s the wrong thing, what if he does it wrong? What if his hands shake, and the water goes everywhere, or he misses and ends up hurting himself somehow. Stabs himself. He doesn’t know.

As long as he stays still, he stays steady – shakes a little, yes, of course – but if he doesn’t move from his uncomfortable ball, then he is steady.

Someone checks on him, and he still doesn’t move. He’s pronounced catatonic schizophrenic in an assured tone, and he still doesn’t move, aside to swallow the wafery tablets they put in his mouth. The things dissolve in the side of his mouth and top of his palatte, and he swallows – and it hurts, fuck it hurts – and it’s still wrong and unsteady because the world swims and he drowns and doesn’t come up for three days.

* * *

He’s released the next day due to his poor reaction to anti-psychotics, tests all came back, not enough beds, resources, he’s better (of course).

Ryou tries his damned best to smile: yes, I am mentally stable.

He can’t.

**Author's Note:**

> Whilst this story might seem exaggerated, it’s actually, well not. Depicted here is a Japanese mental Institute pre-2002, and whilst there have been reforms in the later 2000s, it is not entirely clear if there have been improvements.
> 
> Ryou is subjected to over-sedation, neglect, sexual and physical assault, non-voluntary electroconvulsive therapy, non-voluntary anti-psychotic medication, isolation with an unstable patient, and a three-point face-down restraint system. All of which are still present in many mental health care systems.
> 
> Restraints are classified as torture and kill over a hundred people a year in Australia. Comparatively, ECT, whilst it can help, is extremely traumatic even when performed voluntarily and without consent is as – and sometimes more – traumatizing than sexual assault. 
> 
> ECT involves sending an electric current through the brain in order to induce a seizure, and Bilateral ECT (depicted in this story) often has lasting effects on the memory. This is sort of the equivalent of shutting your computer down at the wall, or reformatting your hard-drive, and is disorienting, invasive and often damages people’s memories.
> 
> Whilst non-voluntary ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) and megadosing (over-sedation) are more common in Japan, full-isolation is more common the U.S and is also considered one of the worst tortures to subject an individual to. Restraints, neglect, assault and non-voluntary treatment options are common across a variety of countries, including the U.K, U.S, Japan and Australia. 
> 
> And this is not something in the distant past – this is treatment that is ongoing. The latest incidents I managed to dig up out of google were reported just last year, and I have no doubt there have been similar ones this year.
> 
> Ryou is lucky enough to be released fairly quickly, especially for a Japanese Institution, but in Japan the average stay is 400 days, compared to the 8 days of the U.S. Nevertheless, it’s not much luck, and no matter how little time is spent in wards, it is almost always traumatic and exacerbating to whatever condition put people there in the first place.
> 
> Essentially the treatment of the mentally unwell in these places has not changed much in the last fifty years, and is in a word, inhumane. If you can, please consider donating or raising awareness for this matter, since this is a serious and current issue facing people today.


End file.
